Hi FME'ers,

Here are the answers and results to yesterday's quiz:

1) Which transformer is the A....P....S....?

• ArcPropertySetter
• AttributePivotSetter
• AzurePageSorter
• AutodeskPolygonShifter
• AuxiliaryPowerSupply

It's the ArcPropertySetter. I hope you all got that. It's really the only one that makes sense, and you could easily look it up by typing APS into the Workbench Quick Add window.

• Red
• Green
• Blue
• Fulvous
• There is no balloon.

The answer is green. Here's proof...

Fulvous (#E48400) is a type of orange-yellow colour. I was going to use smaragdine (#50C875) in the list instead, but that too is green and I didn't want to confuse the issue. Someone should really make a 'strange color bookmark palette' for FME (smaragdine would be good, amaranth means an error!)

3) Safe Software took its name from...

• The Spatial Archive Format for Exchange (SAFE)
• The Spatial Archive Interchange Format (SAIF)
• The Spatial Archive Yardage Format (SAYF)
• The Spatial Archive Hydrological Format (SAHF)
• The Safe (A Russian Band)

I had a lot of fun with making up alternative format names, but the real answer is SAIF. I've no idea why this obscure data format has such a lengthy wikipedia entry, but I love that it does. All data formats should be treated with the same respect in my opinion!

4) With Log Debug turned on, what type of message might you see in an FME log?

• BADNEWS
• ADVERSECONDITION
• PROBLEMREPORT
• REDALERT
• DIRESTRAITS

The answer, of course, is BADNEWS, though I've no idea why we chose that wording.

Log Debug is an option you turn on through Tools > FME Options > Translation in Workbench. It causes more in-depth logging to occur and is particularly useful for debugging database connections and web/http calls. However, you should only turn it on when necessary. Most BADNEWS messages are not as alarming as they seem and are part of a normal translation.

5) How many stops were there on the 2019 FME World Tour?

• 42
• 73
• 99
• 111
• 867-5309

The answer is 73. We're told that in this blog post wrapping up the tour. 73 is also Sheldon Cooper's favourite number, and the name of my favourite Saturday morning TV show as a kid.

For the record...

• 42 is the meaning of life, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• 99 is the atomic number of Einsteinium and also the name of the UK's favourite ice cream.
• 111 is known as eleventy-one in the Lord of the Rings books, and is a special score in cricket called a Nelson
• 867-5309 is - according to the song by Tommy Tutone - Jenny's phone number. It's also a prime number!

6) The ChangeDetector in FME uses what tolerance technique?

• Fuzzy Logic
• Kriging
• Inverse Distance Weighting
• Frechet Distance
• The General Theory of Relativity

It's the Frechet Distance, as noted in this prior blog post. You do read the Safe blog, right? As the blog notes, it's actually a "True Frechet" and not a "Weak Frechet" or "Discrete Frechet". So now you know.

There were a number of perfect scores. I shall have to make the questions harder next week. The full list of scores are:

Question 6 (ChangeDetector algorithm) was the hardest with only 55% correct. Question 3 (the Safe name origin) was the easiest with 85% correct.

If you answered #5 to any question (particularly question 5) then I suspect you weren't taking this particularly seriously!

Anyway, I hope you found this enjoyable. I'm going to run this quiz every Monday and I'll keep a cumulative score to see who is top of the FME quiz charts. I'm thinking that I'll reset the cumulative totals every month.

Mark